Gratitude. Almost guaranteed to raise our vibration.

“Gratitude can turn a negative into a positive. Find a way to be thankful for your troubles and they can become your blessings.”Anon

Gratitude is absolutely the way to bring more into your life.

Guest post by Kat Day, intuitive, life coach and beautiful person 🙂

Gratitude attracts what we want

The universal law of attraction says that we will attract into our life the things we think about and focus on. When you are consciously aware of your blessings, and are grateful for them, you are focusing more clearly on what you do want in your life and attracting it to you.

Gratitude improves relationships

We learn the importance of saying “thank you” as little children. We are taught that habit because it is “good manners.” This childhood lesson is extremely powerful.

Think about those people that you know who are most appreciative of you – and let you know it. How do you feel about them? Be grateful for people, their contributions, their talents and their actions – and make sure you let them know how you feel.

Gratitude helps us learn

Behind every problem lies an opportunity. Being grateful for our situation – even if we don’t like everything about it – allows us to be thankful for the opportunity to learn something new.

Gratitude improves
problem solving skills

Too often we look at problem solving with a very jaded view. “Something is wrong. We have barriers in our way. Then, we have to put in effort to fix it.”

Conversely, when we think about what we are grateful for we open our minds up to new possibilities and connections. We also enter a problem solving situation with a perspective of improvement and opportunity rather than challenge or issue.

Gratitude reduces negativity

It is hard to be negative about your situation when you are thinking about things for which you are grateful. One of the fastest ways to improve your mood or outlook is to count your blessings.

If we are Peaceful,

We are Happy.

“We can blossom like a flower,and everyone in our family,our entire society,will benefit from our peace.”

Being Peace, Tich Nhat Hanh

❤+☮=˚͜˚

Without inner peace,

outer peace is impossible.

“We all wish for world peace, but world peace will never be acheived unless we first establish peace within our own minds. We can send so-called ‘peacekeeping forces’ into areas of conflict, but peace cannot be oppossed from the outside with guns. Only by creating peace within our own mind and helping others to do the same can we hope to achieve peace in this world.”

Transform Your Life, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

By creating peace in our own mindwe create peace between nations.

“The only work that will ultimately bring any good to any of usis the work of contributing to the healing of the world.”

Like this:

Playing with colour is useful and fun!

It can be as therapeutic for adults as it is for kids, and can make a real difference in the grown-up world.
It’s worth knowing about the subtle meaning of colours, and the effect they can have on us.

If we don’t like a colour, we apparently need to spend more time with it, in order to create more balance in our lives. The Color Meanings & Symbolism Chart gives some more interesting colour connections we can work with.

This isn’t just abstract theory either. I generally dislike yellows and reds. They’re unsettling colours for me. I’m on the blue-violet end of the spectrum, where it feels more peaceful. So I try to incorporate some of those warmer colours into my life, to give that balance.

But for others yellow really is a psychologically pleasing colour symbolising wisdom, while red is all about passion. Blues and greens can be seen as being cold and untrustworthy.

Like this:

…Why? Because “If we wish to experience pure happiness, we must acquaint our minds with the truth.” Geshe la, Modern Buddhism

Dream-like emptiness ~

the True Nature of our Reality pt 4,

via Luna Kadampa

This is the last in this series, so it’s your turn now ~ how useful do you think the idea of dream-like emptiness is? Do you have another ‘pet emptiness meditation’ that you prefer? Or is this approach just not helpful, as it takes our attention way from what we need to do in the real world….

¸.•*””*•.¸❤

the dream series ~

nb. Aren’t blogs amazing? Unlike boring old TV, which tells you what to think, and where ‘last in series‘ could mean that you’ve missed an epic saga. In a blog, you get to think for yourself, and all you have to do is click on a link to get the previous bit (or the next, depending where you landed :~).

None of this could exist without our mind perceiving it. It’s all empty of independent existence, a state known as ‘emptiness’.

pt 2, Life is but a dream:Like a Dream
Nagarjuna’s view of dream-like emptiness.

pt 3, Cosmic Loti: Dream a Better World.
Dream lands and the waking world are experientially the same. That’s why they both feel equally real, and that’s why we can influence them far more than we give ourselves credit for.

pt 4, Kadampa Life:Am I Dreaming?
Buddha’s teachings reveal the truth that everything is like a dream.

For years I have been using my dreams to gain a deeper understanding of the ultimate nature of reality. I’ve trained myself to remember my dreams first thing in the morning and compare them to my waking world in order to see for myself the truth of Buddha’s teachings that everything is like a dream.

Why do I want to do that? Because I find life is a lot more fun when I am not grasping at it in a crunchy real way, and can instead dissolve away appearances and have choice over how to impute and perceive my world. Our own dreams show how everything depends upon our mind – if our mind changes, our world changes, and if our mind ceases, the object ceases. As my teacher Geshe Kelsang says in How to Understand the Mind:

Like this:

Dream-like emptiness ~ the True Nature of our Reality, pt 3

“Buddha said ‘you should know that all phenomena are like dreams.”

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, Modern Buddhism

Everything we see and perceive is no more real than last night’s dream.

Our experiences in this waking world certainly feel more real, and follow a more logical set of rules. If we jaywalk in front of a bus for example, it tends to matter a lot more if we do it when we’re awake, rather than tucked up safely in our beds.

So why would Milarepa, the Tibetan yogi and Saint, come out with:

“Last night’s dream was my teacher.

Is it the same for you?”

Not because he was likely to get run over by a bus in 10th century Tibet, but because he knew we create our reality. Reality doesn’t really exist, we unknowingly create it for ourselves via emptiness, one of the fundamental teachings of Buddhism.
That’s why co-creation can work so well. We’re taking resposibility for the world we create.

Buddha often taught using analogies, and the dream state is a brilliant analogy for how our waking world doesn’t have any inherent, concrete existence. So Buddha explained emptiness using the dream analogy.

As we’re falling asleep, our mind becomes increasingly subtle.
“In that subtle level of mind, a dream world appears.” Chönden
“This world may be similar to the world of our waking state, or it may be quite bizarre, but in either case, while we are dreaming, it appears to be utterly real.”
old Heart of Wisdom, Geshe-la

Check it out! Remember a vivid dream, or, if we only remember fragments from our dreams last night, did they feel real to us at the time, and did we we react as we normally would?
The answer for most of us will be yes. But if we knew we were dreaming, we could change our reactions to something more productive.